We always thought the power of open source hardware lies in the ability to build upon others’ work and, when it comes to hardware, good documentation is the key to making this happen.

As the number of open source projects continue to grow, it’s important to generate clearly-findable, modular, remixable documentation that can not only improve the quality of projects—but can also enhance cross-project collaboration. Quality documentation is essential to boosting the true spirit of open innovation.

Despite the fact that the open source hardware movement has come a long way in the last few years, a number of outstanding issues are still slowing down its expansion and ability to become a new economic engine of efficiency, sustainability, and collaboration.

Only a shared, modular approach to open source hardware design and documentation, will facilitate this transition and will encourage others to contribute to a common pool of human knowledge.

The documentation event

Being conscious of the wide scope of the challenges (ranging from Software to User Experience), we have organized a 3-day event: The Open Source Hardware Documentation Jam will be focused on identifying and sharing outstanding problems concerning the diffusion of open source hardware documentation practices and generating creative solutions and prototyping them collaboratively.

This event will be the first of its kind; based on a mashup of well known co-design formats for group cooperation such as service design Jams and hackathons.

When I first started working with Catarina and Marcin on this project, we had no idea that the fruit of efforts would be organizing such a collaborative event. I think my ouishare legacy helped facilitate this route: collaboration is key, and openness and inclusion are great drivers of passion and innovation.

The documentation jam will be an opportunity to nurture new ideas on how to help Open Source Hardware get better find new friends and partners and learn something radically new.

A call for software developers

We need a diverse group of people to be a part of the Jam (more on that here), but because opensource.com is a favourite of great developers, we want to call you to:

If you have interest in collaborative software, like Github or wikis, or even CADs and the like—and are interested in helping the OSHW movement create new solutions to enhance technology transfer and documentation—check us out and join us!

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